Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

Takashi Murai

The "immortal jellyfish" can transform itself back into a polyp and begin life anew.

After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": "Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . ."

Yoshihiko Ueda for The New York Times

Shin Kubota at Kyoto University's Seto Marine Biological Laboratory.

Sommer was conducting research on hydrozoans, small invertebrates that, depending on their stage in the life cycle, resemble either a jellyfish or a soft coral. Every morning, Sommer went snorkeling in the turquoise water off the cliffs of Portofino. He scanned the ocean floor for hydrozoans, gathering them with plankton nets. Among the hundreds of organisms he collected was a tiny, relatively obscure species known to biologists as Turritopsis dohrnii. Today it is more commonly known as the immortal jellyfish.

Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that his Turritopsis dohrnii was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared to age in reverse, growing younger and younger until it reached its earliest stage of development, at which point it began its life cycle anew.

Sommer was baffled by this development but didn't immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word "immortal" was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer's finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called "Reversing the Life Cycle." The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism's earliest stage of life, "thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality." This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.

One of the paper's authors, Ferdinando Boero, likened the Turritopsis to a butterfly that, instead of dying, turns back into a caterpillar. Another metaphor is a chicken that transforms into an egg, which gives birth to another chicken. The anthropomorphic analogy is that of an old man who grows younger and younger until he is again a fetus. For this reason Turritopsis dohrnii is often referred to as the Benjamin Button jellyfish.

Yet the publication of "Reversing the Life Cycle" barely registered outside the academic world. You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology. But none of this happened.

Some progress has been made, however, in the quarter-century since Christian Sommer's discovery. We now know, for instance, that the rejuvenation of Turritopsis dohrnii and some other members of the genus is caused by environmental stress or physical assault. We know that, during rejuvenation, it undergoes cellular transdifferentiation, an unusual process by which one type of cell is converted into another — a skin cell into a nerve cell, for instance. (The same process occurs in human stem cells.) We also know that, in recent decades, the immortal jellyfish has rapidly spread throughout the world's oceans in what Maria Pia Miglietta, a biology professor at Notre Dame, calls "a silent invasion." The jellyfish has been "hitchhiking" on cargo ships that use seawater for ballast. Turritopsis has now been observed not only in the Mediterranean but also off the coasts of Panama, Spain, Florida and Japan. The jellyfish seems able to survive, and proliferate, in every ocean in the world. It is possible to imagine a distant future in which most other species of life are extinct but the ocean will consist overwhelmingly of immortal jellyfish, a great gelatin consciousness everlasting.

Nathaniel Rich is an author whose second novel, ''Odds Against Tomorrow,'' will be published in April.

Editor: Jon Kelly

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Charles Darwin's classic book on the subject of evolution. It is "On The Origin of Species," not "On the Origin of the Species."

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Mercury Home to Ice, Messenger Spacecraft Findings Suggest

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Deep within craters near Mercury's poles, temperatures dip to as low as 370 degrees below zero.

Mercury is as cold as ice.

Indeed, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, possesses a lot of ice — 100 billion to one trillion tons — scientists working with NASA's Messenger spacecraft reported on Thursday.

Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for Messenger, said there was enough ice there to encase Washington, D.C., in a frozen block two and a half miles deep.

That is a counterintuitive discovery for a place that also ranks among the hottest in the solar system. At noon at the equator on Mercury, the temperature can hit 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

But near Mercury's poles, deep within craters where the Sun never shines, temperatures dip to as cold as minus 370.

"In these planetary bodies, there are hidden places, as it were, that can have interesting things going on," said David J. Lawrence, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory working on the Messenger mission.

The findings appear in a set of three papers published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science. The ice could be an intriguing science target for a future robotic lander or even a resource for astronauts in the far future.

Planetary scientists had strong hints of the ice a couple of decades ago when telescopes bounced radio waves off Mercury and the reflections were surprisingly bright. But some researchers suggested the craters could be lined with silicate compounds or sulfur, which might also be highly reflective.

The Messenger spacecraft, which swung into orbit around Mercury in March 2011 and has completed its primary mission, took a closer look by counting particles known as neutrons that are flying off the planet. High-energy cosmic rays break apart atoms, and the debris includes neutrons.

But when a speeding neutron hits a hydrogen atom, which is almost the same weight, it comes to almost a complete stop, just as the cue ball in billiards transfers its momentum when it hits another ball. Water molecules contain two hydrogen atoms, and thus when Messenger passed over ice-rich areas, the number of neutrons dropped.

The same technique was used to detect frozen water below the surface on Mars and within similar craters on the Moon.

The neutron number would not have dropped if the bright surfaces had been made of sulfur or silicates.

"Water ice is the only candidate we've got that fits all those observations," said Dr. Solomon, who is also director of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The ice is almost pure water, which indicates that it arrived within the last few tens of millions of years, possibly from a comet that smacked into Mercury. Dr. Solomon said several young craters on the surface of Mercury could be candidates for such an impact.

Not all of the icy regions were bright. In slightly warmer regions, where temperatures exceed minus 280, the ice was covered by a dark layer about half a foot thick. The scientists believe in these places the water ice vaporized, leaving behind other materials that had been trapped, including carbon-based molecules known as organics.

That could be similar to how water and the building blocks of life reached Earth billions of years ago.

The water could also be an intriguing resource for people. Between the scorched equator and the frozen poles, temperatures on Mercury can be temperate, especially a few feet below the surface, where the soil insulates against the temperature swings between day and night — an ideal location to build a colony.

"People joke about it, but it's not so crazy, really," said David A. Paige, a professor of geology at U.C.L.A. who calculated the crater temperatures.

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60-Million-Year Debate on Grand Canyon’s Age

Richard Perry/The New York Times

New research suggests that the Grand Canyon is about 70 million years old, but the prevailing view is that it is much younger.

How old is the Grand Canyon? Old enough to be gazed on by dinosaurs, which died out 65 million years ago, or closer to six million years old, formed about when the earliest human ancestors began walking upright?

A bitter controversy among geologists over this question edged into the open on Thursday, when a report published in the journal Science offered new support for the old-canyon hypothesis, which is not the prevailing one. In the report, Rebecca M. Flowers of the University of Colorado and Kenneth A. Farley of the California Institute of Technology used an improved dating technique based on the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium atoms into helium atoms in a mineral known as apatite. They said this yielded a thermal record of these rocks under the canyon floor, hot at great depths but cooler the closer they were to the surface.

An analysis of the data, the geologists said, revealed where surface erosion had gouged out canyons and how much time had passed since there was significant natural excavation in the Grand Canyon region. They concluded in the report that the western segment of the canyon was carved to within a few hundred yards of modern depths by about 70 million years ago.

The more ancient origin would put much of the canyon in place in the last epoch of the dinosaurs. Publicity for the journal report duly noted that one of nature's wonders, dinosaurs, might well have stood and gawked at another wonder, one of today's most majestic tourist attractions.

This was only one of the immediate objections to the findings raised by geologists favoring the young-canyon school of thought. They said that the research results had been hyped. One critic, Karl E. Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico, noted that the early-canyon model had been proposed before and was "now in what I think will be a short-lived revival."

If the interpretation of the findings proves to be correct, it contradicts the prevailing hypothesis that the entire canyon was formed as recently as five million to six million years ago, advocated by many of the notable authorities on Grand Canyon geology. These dates were drawn from an examination of pebbles and other sediments from upstream reaches of the Colorado River system that washed up at the western exit of the canyon.

Dr. Flowers said that when she started this research seven years ago, she had not expected to find the canyon's presumed age to be so ancient. But the first set of experiments with the radioactive helium technique in 2008 was followed up with a new round of tests and more sophisticated levels of analysis.

In their paper, Dr. Flowers and Dr. Farley wrote that their findings implied a dichotomy in the late eastern and early western canyon origins. This history, they said, "supports a model in which much of Grand Canyon incision was accomplished by an ancient Cretaceous river that flowed eastward from western highlands," not from northeast to west, as today's Colorado River does. This was followed by a "reversal of the river's course as topography rose in the east and collapsed in the west," in consequence of the rising Rocky Mountains.

Dr. Flowers said in an interview that the findings supported the ancient-origin hypothesis advanced in recent years by Brian P. Wernicke, a Caltech geologist, who had proposed such a chain of events. It is still not clear when the eastern and western canyons merged into the canyon as it is seen today.

She also said she foresaw "a fair amount of controversy" over the research results. That turned out to be an understatement, even before the official publication date.

Dr. Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico is a leader among geologists who have devoted much of their careers to Grand Canyon studies. When reporters called this week, he was prepared with four pages of criticism of the new research. He pointed out that at a meeting two years ago of the most active Grand Canyon researchers, "a near consensus view was expressed" in support of the young-canyon hypothesis.

As a rule of thumb, he defined the Grand Canyon as "the canyon you see from the rim today." How fragments of paleocanyons and paleorivers contributed to the Grand Canyon's origin is not established, he said.

Dr. Karlstrom was not entirely negative in his assessment of the research. He praised the thermochronology method the researchers used, saying it "offers one of the few ways we may be able to reconstruct past landscapes in rocks that have long since been eroded away." The Flowers-Farley team, he added, "is pushing welcome new advances" in this dating technology.

"Less welcome to me," he continued, "is their attempt to push the interpretation of their new data to their limits without consideration of the whole range of other geologic data sets."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the direction in which the Colorado River flows. It flows from northeast to west, not from west to northeast.

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Undisclosed Finding by Mars Rover Fuels Intrigue

The Mars rover Curiosity has found something — something noteworthy, in a pinch of Martian sand. But what is it?

NASA/JPL-Caltech, via Malin Space Science Systems, via EPA

The Curiosity rover in a self-portrait stitched together from 55 images taken by a camera at the end of one of its arms. Data from the rover's first soil sample is now being analyzed by scientists.

The scientists working on the mission who know are not saying. Outside of that team, lots of people are guessing.

The intrigue started last week when John P. Grotzinger, the Mars mission's project scientist, told National Public Radio: "This data is going to be one for the history books. It's looking really good."

And then he declined to say anything more.

Fossils? Living microbial Martians? Maybe the carbon-based molecules known as organics, which are the building blocks of life? That so much excitement could be set off by a passing hint reflects the enduring fascination of both scientists and nonscientists with Mars.

"It could be all kinds of things," said Peter H. Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who was the principal investigator for NASA's earlier Phoenix Mars mission but is not involved with Curiosity. "If it's historic, I think it's organics. That would be historic in my book."

Dr. Grotzinger and other Curiosity scientists will announce their latest findings on Monday in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Do not expect pictures of Martians, though.

Guy Webster, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which operates Curiosity, said the findings would be "interesting" rather than "earthshaking."

Mr. Webster noted that "a really big announcement," if one should occur, would most likely be made at NASA headquarters in Washington and not at an academic conference.

Whatever is revealed will be linked to the work of Curiosity's sophisticated chemistry laboratory instrument, Sample Analysis at Mars — SAM, for short. The rover's robotic arm dropped the first bit of sand and dust into the instrument on Nov. 9, and the scientists have been analyzing and contemplating ever since.

One of the main goals of SAM is to identify organic molecules, but it would be a big surprise for organics to show up in a first look at a sand sample selected more as a test exercise than with the expectation of a breakthrough discovery.

Curiosity will be headed toward layers of clays, which could be rich in organics and are believed to have formed during a warm and wet era early in the planet's history. But Curiosity has months to drive before arriving at those locations.

And the Curiosity scientists have learned through experience that it pays to double-check their results before trumpeting them. An initial test of the Martian atmosphere by the same instrument showed the presence of methane, which would have been a major discovery, possibly indicating the presence of methane-generating microbes living on Mars today. But when the scientists ran the experiment again, the signs of methane disappeared, leading them to conclude that the methane found in the first test had come from air that the spacecraft had carried to Mars from its launching spot in Florida.

Mr. Webster, who was present during the interview with NPR, said Dr. Grotzinger had been talking more generally about the quality of data coming back from Curiosity and was not suggesting that the data contained a breakthrough surprise. "I don't think he had in mind, 'Here's some particular chemical that's been found,' " Mr. Webster said. "That's not my impression of the conversation."

On Twitter, Curiosity chimed in: "What did I discover on Mars? That rumors spread fast online. My team considers this whole mission 'one for the history books.' " (The public information staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory writes the posts for the rover.)

This would not be the first time that rumors eclipsed the actual findings from Mars.

In 2002, the Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of frozen reservoirs of water beneath the surface of Mars, leading to breathless rumors in the British press that the Bush administration was about to announce a commitment to send astronauts there within 20 years. The White House remained quiet.

Dr. Smith, the Phoenix Mars scientist, had a similar experience in 2008 when Aviation Week reported, "The White House has been alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the 'potential for life' on Mars."

"The blogosphere lit up," Dr. Smith said.

At a hastily arranged news conference, Dr. Smith revealed the actual news: chemicals known as perchlorates had been found in the soil. "The public was not interested in that," he said.

If Curiosity's pinch of sand indeed contained organics, it would again revive the possibilities of life on Mars. For now, Curiosity scientists are still analyzing the data.

"I do want to temper expectations," said Mr. Webster, the spokesman. "But then again, I don't know exactly what they're going to say they've found."

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Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

Takashi Murai

The "immortal jellyfish" can transform itself back into a polyp and begin life anew.

After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": "Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . ."

Yoshihiko Ueda for The New York Times

Shin Kubota at Kyoto University's Seto Marine Biological Laboratory.

Sommer was conducting research on hydrozoans, small invertebrates that, depending on their stage in the life cycle, resemble either a jellyfish or a soft coral. Every morning, Sommer went snorkeling in the turquoise water off the cliffs of Portofino. He scanned the ocean floor for hydrozoans, gathering them with plankton nets. Among the hundreds of organisms he collected was a tiny, relatively obscure species known to biologists as Turritopsis dohrnii. Today it is more commonly known as the immortal jellyfish.

Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that his Turritopsis dohrnii was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared to age in reverse, growing younger and younger until it reached its earliest stage of development, at which point it began its life cycle anew.

Sommer was baffled by this development but didn't immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word "immortal" was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer's finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called "Reversing the Life Cycle." The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism's earliest stage of life, "thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality." This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.

One of the paper's authors, Ferdinando Boero, likened the Turritopsis to a butterfly that, instead of dying, turns back into a caterpillar. Another metaphor is a chicken that transforms into an egg, which gives birth to another chicken. The anthropomorphic analogy is that of an old man who grows younger and younger until he is again a fetus. For this reason Turritopsis dohrnii is often referred to as the Benjamin Button jellyfish.

Yet the publication of "Reversing the Life Cycle" barely registered outside the academic world. You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology. But none of this happened.

Some progress has been made, however, in the quarter-century since Christian Sommer's discovery. We now know, for instance, that the rejuvenation of Turritopsis dohrnii and some other members of the genus is caused by environmental stress or physical assault. We know that, during rejuvenation, it undergoes cellular transdifferentiation, an unusual process by which one type of cell is converted into another — a skin cell into a nerve cell, for instance. (The same process occurs in human stem cells.) We also know that, in recent decades, the immortal jellyfish has rapidly spread throughout the world's oceans in what Maria Pia Miglietta, a biology professor at Notre Dame, calls "a silent invasion." The jellyfish has been "hitchhiking" on cargo ships that use seawater for ballast. Turritopsis has now been observed not only in the Mediterranean but also off the coasts of Panama, Spain, Florida and Japan. The jellyfish seems able to survive, and proliferate, in every ocean in the world. It is possible to imagine a distant future in which most other species of life are extinct but the ocean will consist overwhelmingly of immortal jellyfish, a great gelatin consciousness everlasting.

Nathaniel Rich is an author whose second novel, ''Odds Against Tomorrow,'' will be published in April.

Editor: Jon Kelly

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U.N. Agency Says 2012 Ranks Among Hottest Years

GENEVA — This year has ranked among the nine warmest since records began more than 160 years ago, continuing a trend for the planet that is increasing the dangers of extreme weather events, according to United Nations meteorologists.

"It confirms the trend towards a warmer planet," Michel Jarraud, head of the World Meteorological Organization at the United Nations, said in Geneva on Wednesday as he delivered a provisional assessment intended to inform policy makers and negotiators attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar.

The final judgment on 2012 will come in March, but Mr. Jarraud said that meteorologists were not observing any major events that would greatly alter the preliminary findings.

"Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records," he added in a prepared statement.

Among the most conspicuous evidence of climate change associated with global warming was the "alarming" rate at which Arctic ice had melted during the summer months, he said. The melting this year occurred at a much faster rate than in 2011 and outpaced the predictions of climate experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said.

By September, the level of Arctic ice was the lowest since satellite records began and had shrunk by nearly half — an area nearly the size of India — below the average minimum level in the 20 years before 2000, the organization reported.

The ice will reform in the winter but will be thinner than before and more vulnerable to further melting, Mr. Jarraud warned. "The trend is not only continuing but accelerating," he said. "The more it melts, the faster it will melt."

The ice melt will contribute to rising sea levels that are already 20 centimeters, or nearly 8 inches, higher than a century ago, Mr. Jarraud said, posing added risks in the event of extreme weather. Hurricane Sandy would have had less impact on New York if it had occurred 100 years ago when sea levels were lower, he said.

After a chilly start to 2012, average temperatures from January to October were 0.45 degrees Celsius, or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit, above the average from 1961 to 1990, according to the World Meteorological Organization's findings. A rise of only one degree Celsius was sufficient to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, Mr. Jarraud said.

The above-average temperatures experienced in 2012 had been marked by record temperatures in areas like Greenland, Siberia and central China, the World Meteorological Organization reported.

Much of the United States, together with parts of Europe, western Russia and southern China, had suffered severe drought, while parts of West and sub-Saharan Africa had experienced severe flooding.

Meteorologists have been at pains to make clear that no major weather event was the result of a single cause, but research into climate change was establishing clear links, Mr. Jarraud said, citing the results of research into the extreme heat wave in Russia in 2010. "Without climate change, this episode would have been very unlikely," he said.

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Essay: Biblical Literalists’ Clash With Science

It was the standard political interview, about ambition and the right size for government. Then came the curveball question to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida from Michael Hainey of GQ magazine: "How old do you think the earth is?"

Senator Rubio, a possible contender in the 2016 Republican presidential race, gave the following answer: "I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians."

He went on: "At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created, and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says.

"Whether the earth was created in seven days, or seven actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."

It may have been a mystery back in the 17th century, when Archbishop James Ussher calculated from the age of the patriarchs and other sources that Earth was created on Oct. 22, 4004 B.C. Today's best estimate for the age of Earth, based on the radiometric dating of meteorites, is 4.54 billion years. The real mystery is how a highly intelligent politician got himself into the position of suggesting that the two estimates are of equal value, or that theologians are still the best interpreters of the physical world.

Catholics and Jews have always emphasized their priests' interpretations of the Bible, not the text itself; Protestants, starting with Martin Luther, insisted the Bible was the literal truth and the sole dependable source of divine knowledge, a belief the Puritans implanted firmly in American soil. Then, in the 19th century, German textual critics like Julius Wellhausen showed that the Bible was not the inerrant product of divine inspiration but had been cobbled together by many hands whose editing was all too evident.

At that point most Protestants decided to join Catholics in interpreting the Bible metaphorically and avoiding embarrassing public spats with science. But after discussions in the early 20th century, the conservative wing of the Protestant movement elected to double down their bet and insist that every word in the Bible was true.

The inevitable clash with science, particularly in the teaching of evolution, has continued to this day. Militant atheists like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins beat the believers about the head, accomplishing nothing; fundamentalist Christians naturally defend their religion and values to the hilt, whatever science may say.

A scientific statesman, if there were such a person, would try to defuse the situation by professing respect for all religions and making a grand yet also trivial concession about the status of evolution.

Like those electrons that can be waves or particles, evolution is both a theory and a fact. In historical terms, evolution has certainly occurred and no fact is better attested. But in terms of the intellectual structure of science, evolution is a theory; no one talks about Darwin's "fact of evolution."

Unlike a fact, a theory cannot be absolutely true. All scientific theories are subject to change and replacement, just as Newton's theory of gravitation was replaced by Einstein's. The theory of evolution, though it has no present rivals, is still under substantial construction.

Evolutionary biologists are furiously debating whether or not natural selection can operate on groups of individuals, as Darwin thought was likely but most modern evolutionists doubt. So which version of evolution is the true one?

By allowing that evolution is a theory, scientists would hand fundamentalists the fig leaf they need to insist, at least among themselves, that the majestic words of the first chapter of Genesis are literal, not metaphorical, truths. They in return should make no objection to the teaching of evolution in science classes as a theory, which indeed it is.

And rudderless politicians like Senator Rubio wouldn't have to throw 15 back flips and a hissy fit when asked a simple question like how old is the earth.

Nicholas Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, is the author of "The Faith Instinct," about the evolutionary basis of religion.

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Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.

Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe's, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.

This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.

Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.

But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.

The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association's effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it's allowed in at all.

Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: "All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn't make it the easiest."

The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field's most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?

Habits of Thought

It wasn't supposed to be this difficult.

Personality problems aren't exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues' gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.

Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.

Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of "confounded identities" that are now considered personality disorders.

Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.

"These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired," said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. "They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether."

Several prototypes soon began to emerge. "A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character," wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, "Character Analysis," a groundbreaking text. "In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern."

Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.

In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association's third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.

These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.

Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.

This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. "Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified," a catchall label meaning little more than "this person has problems" became the most common of the diagnoses.

It's a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn't have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.

Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.

"The diagnoses simply weren't being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible," Dr. Lenzenweger said.

Resisting Simplification 

It was easier said than done.

The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.

A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.

The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to "develop a coherent sense of self or identity." Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.

Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.

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Undisclosed Finding by Mars Rover Fuels Intrigue

The Mars rover Curiosity has found something — something noteworthy, in a pinch of Martian sand. But what is it?

NASA/JPL-Caltech, via Malin Space Science Systems, via EPA

The Curiosity rover in a self-portrait stitched together from 55 images taken by a camera at the end of one of its arms. Data from the rover's first soil sample is now being analyzed by scientists.

The scientists working on the mission who know are not saying. Outside of that team, lots of people are guessing.

The intrigue started last week when John P. Grotzinger, the Mars mission's project scientist, told National Public Radio: "This data is going to be one for the history books. It's looking really good."

And then he declined to say anything more.

Fossils? Living microbial Martians? Maybe the carbon-based molecules known as organics, which are the building blocks of life? That so much excitement could be set off by a passing hint reflects the enduring fascination of both scientists and nonscientists with Mars.

"It could be all kinds of things," said Peter H. Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who was the principal investigator for NASA's earlier Phoenix Mars mission but is not involved with Curiosity. "If it's historic, I think it's organics. That would be historic in my book."

Dr. Grotzinger and other Curiosity scientists will announce their latest findings on Monday in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Do not expect pictures of Martians, though.

Guy Webster, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which operates Curiosity, said the findings would be "interesting" rather than "earthshaking."

Mr. Webster noted that "a really big announcement," if one should occur, would most likely be made at NASA headquarters in Washington and not at an academic conference.

Whatever is revealed will be linked to the work of Curiosity's sophisticated chemistry laboratory instrument, Sample Analysis at Mars — SAM, for short. The rover's robotic arm dropped the first bit of sand and dust into the instrument on Nov. 9, and the scientists have been analyzing and contemplating ever since.

One of the main goals of SAM is to identify organic molecules, but it would be a big surprise for organics to show up in a first look at a sand sample selected more as a test exercise than with the expectation of a breakthrough discovery.

Curiosity will be headed toward layers of clays, which could be rich in organics and are believed to have formed during a warm and wet era early in the planet's history. But Curiosity has months to drive before arriving at those locations.

And the Curiosity scientists have learned through experience that it pays to double-check their results before trumpeting them. An initial test of the Martian atmosphere by the same instrument showed the presence of methane, which would have been a major discovery, possibly indicating the presence of methane-generating microbes living on Mars today. But when the scientists ran the experiment again, the signs of methane disappeared, leading them to conclude that the methane found in the first test had come from air that the spacecraft had carried to Mars from its launching spot in Florida.

Mr. Webster, who was present during the interview with NPR, said Dr. Grotzinger had been talking more generally about the quality of data coming back from Curiosity and was not suggesting that the data contained a breakthrough surprise. "I don't think he had in mind, 'Here's some particular chemical that's been found,' " Mr. Webster said. "That's not my impression of the conversation."

On Twitter, Curiosity chimed in: "What did I discover on Mars? That rumors spread fast online. My team considers this whole mission 'one for the history books.' " (The public information staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory writes the posts for the rover.)

This would not be the first time that rumors eclipsed the actual findings from Mars.

In 2002, the Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of frozen reservoirs of water beneath the surface of Mars, leading to breathless rumors in the British press that the Bush administration was about to announce a commitment to send astronauts there within 20 years. The White House remained quiet.

Dr. Smith, the Phoenix Mars scientist, had a similar experience in 2008 when Aviation Week reported, "The White House has been alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the 'potential for life' on Mars."

"The blogosphere lit up," Dr. Smith said.

At a hastily arranged news conference, Dr. Smith revealed the actual news: chemicals known as perchlorates had been found in the soil. "The public was not interested in that," he said.

If Curiosity's pinch of sand indeed contained organics, it would again revive the possibilities of life on Mars. For now, Curiosity scientists are still analyzing the data.

"I do want to temper expectations," said Mr. Webster, the spokesman. "But then again, I don't know exactly what they're going to say they've found."

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Essay: Biblical Literalists’ Clash With Science

It was the standard political interview, about ambition and the right size for government. Then came the curveball question to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida from Michael Hainey of GQ magazine: "How old do you think the earth is?"

Senator Rubio, a possible contender in the 2016 Republican presidential race, gave the following answer: "I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians."

He went on: "At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created, and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says.

"Whether the earth was created in seven days, or seven actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."

It may have been a mystery back in the 17th century, when Archbishop James Ussher calculated from the age of the patriarchs and other sources that Earth was created on Oct. 22, 4004 B.C. Today's best estimate for the age of Earth, based on the radiometric dating of meteorites, is 4.54 billion years. The real mystery is how a highly intelligent politician got himself into the position of suggesting that the two estimates are of equal value, or that theologians are still the best interpreters of the physical world.

Catholics and Jews have always emphasized their priests' interpretations of the Bible, not the text itself; Protestants, starting with Martin Luther, insisted the Bible was the literal truth and the sole dependable source of divine knowledge, a belief the Puritans implanted firmly in American soil. Then, in the 19th century, German textual critics like Julius Wellhausen showed that the Bible was not the inerrant product of divine inspiration but had been cobbled together by many hands whose editing was all too evident.

At that point most Protestants decided to join Catholics in interpreting the Bible metaphorically and avoiding embarrassing public spats with science. But after discussions in the early 20th century, the conservative wing of the Protestant movement elected to double down their bet and insist that every word in the Bible was true.

The inevitable clash with science, particularly in the teaching of evolution, has continued to this day. Militant atheists like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins beat the believers about the head, accomplishing nothing; fundamentalist Christians naturally defend their religion and values to the hilt, whatever science may say.

A scientific statesman, if there were such a person, would try to defuse the situation by professing respect for all religions and making a grand yet also trivial concession about the status of evolution.

Like those electrons that can be waves or particles, evolution is both a theory and a fact. In historical terms, evolution has certainly occurred and no fact is better attested. But in terms of the intellectual structure of science, evolution is a theory; no one talks about Darwin's "fact of evolution."

Unlike a fact, a theory cannot be absolutely true. All scientific theories are subject to change and replacement, just as Newton's theory of gravitation was replaced by Einstein's. The theory of evolution, though it has no present rivals, is still under substantial construction.

Evolutionary biologists are furiously debating whether or not natural selection can operate on groups of individuals, as Darwin thought was likely but most modern evolutionists doubt. So which version of evolution is the true one?

By allowing that evolution is a theory, scientists would hand fundamentalists the fig leaf they need to insist, at least among themselves, that the majestic words of the first chapter of Genesis are literal, not metaphorical, truths. They in return should make no objection to the teaching of evolution in science classes as a theory, which indeed it is.

And rudderless politicians like Senator Rubio wouldn't have to throw 15 back flips and a hissy fit when asked a simple question like how old is the earth.

Nicholas Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, is the author of "The Faith Instinct," about the evolutionary basis of religion.

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Studying Cities to Find Global Warming’s Benefits

Heat, carbon dioxide and air pollution are already having significant effects on trees, plants and crops, and for most plant scientists, the debate over climate change ended long before the arrival of extreme weather like Hurricane Sandy.

Now, some of those scientists have moved beyond political questions to explore how rising levels of heat and emissions might provide at least some benefits for the planet.

"There is a lot of emphasis on the mitigation of global warming, and we need that," said Lewis H. Ziska, a plant physiologist for the Department of Agriculture, who is one of a growing number of scientists studying how plants react to elevated levels of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. At the same time, he added, "we need to think about the tools we have at hand, and how we can use them to make climate change work for us."

Among the tools are cities, which have conditions that can mimic what life may be like in the temperate zone of a heated planet.

"The city is our baseline for what might happen in future decades, and with all the negative effects global warming may have, there may be a bit of a silver lining," said Stephanie Searle, a plant physiologist who led a Columbia University research project on tree growth, and now works as a biofuels researcher at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. "Higher nighttime temperatures, at least, may boost plant growth." Robust growth takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Still, some emissions are not helpful to plants. There are also plenty of modern pollutants, like ozone and heavy metals, which are toxic to plants, to humans or to both. And so far, the long-term effects on plant life on a heated planet are unclear. "I try to avoid words like 'good,' 'bad,' 'detrimental' or 'beneficial,' " said Kevin L. Griffin, an ecophysiologist at Columbia University who participated in a study about the "heat island effect" on the red oak trees in New York.

The effects of higher, mostly urban emissions are what prompted Dr. Ziska to reappraise global warming as a potential benefit to humanity. In an essay last summer in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Dr. Ziska and a group of colleagues from across the world argued that an expected increase in world population to 9 billion people from 7 billion by 2050 necessitated a "green revolution" to enhance yields of basic grains. Carbon dioxide, the group suggested, could be the answer.

Since 1960, world atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by 24 percent to 392 parts per million and could reach 1,000 parts per million by the end of this century.

While plants need carbon dioxide and generally perform better with higher concentrations of it, "not every species responds," Dr. Ziska said. This may be especially true of domesticated species, which have little genetic diversity.

"Breeders are not actively selecting for CO2 response," Dr. Ziska said. "They are more interested in drought resistance and pest control."

In the wild, however, "nature selects for whatever works," he said. "Our hypothesis is that nature in the wild will select much faster for CO2."

Dr. Ziska said that his research focuses on rice, but that scientists should also be able to find the wild progenitors of "soybeans, wheat, oats and on down the line." If they are successful, "we get a double value," he said."What we want is to absorb more CO2 and exploit the CO2 as a means to increase yield. That's the goal."

In New York, the Columbia researchers studied for eight years the growth of red oak seedlings at four locations, including an "urban" site near the northeastern edge of Central Park at 105th Street and a "remote" site in the Catskills 100 miles north of Manhattan near the Ashokan Reservoir.

Dr. Griffin, who supervised the project in conjunction with the Black Rock Forest Consortium of upstate New York, chose red oaks because they are a native New York species. He said he wanted his students to see if they could figure out whether city oaks grew differently from country oaks, and, if so, why.

Cities produce high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and ozone, all of which influence plant performance.

The heat island effect arises because buildings, pavement and asphalt are better at absorbing and retaining solar energy than the fields and forests of the countryside. During the hot months, the city's stored energy radiates back into the atmosphere after dark, keeping nighttime urban temperatures markedly higher than rural temperatures.

The Columbia team's first red oak experiments ended in 2006, and average minimum temperatures in August were 71.6 degrees at the city site, but 63.5 degrees in the Catskills. Researchers also noticed that the city oaks had elevated levels of leaf nitrogen, a plant nutrient.

The team did two more rounds of experiments, then in 2008 made a final outdoor test using fertilized rural soil everywhere so all the seedlings got plenty of nitrogen. The urban oaks, harvested in August 2008, weighed eight times as much as their rural cousins, mostly because of increased foliage.

"On warm nights, the tree respires more," Dr. Griffin said. "It invests its carbon sugars to build tissue." By morning, the tree's sugars are depleted, and it has to photosynthesize more during the day, he continued. The tree grows more leaves and gets bigger.

Still, it is clear that there are some emissions that are not helpful to plants, even in the north. The inspiration for the red oak experiments was a 2003 study in the journal Nature describing how cottonwoods grew twice as fast in New York City as they did in the country. But in that case, the difference in growth was not a matter of benefits from city emissions. Rather, cottonwoods in the country faced higher concentrations of atmospheric ozone, which stunted their growth.

Jillian Gregg, an ecologist who led the study, said that while cottonwoods were sensitive to ozone, many plants are susceptible to its effects. Ozone, or O3, a three-atom molecule of oxygen, can severely damage plant pores, causing them to grow more slowly.

The elevated ozone comes from the city, where nitric oxide from automobile exhaust and factories becomes a catalyst enabling free oxygen atoms to combine with atmospheric oxygen, O2, to create ozone molecules. But much of the urban ozone eventually reverts back to O2. The ozone that does not change back blows out to the country.

Scientists caution that while the studies of New York City in August may be a way to preview what the temperate zone might be like in the future, lush parks during northern summers could mean trouble in hotter latitudes. Also, if trees grow faster for a couple of years, that says nothing about how their root systems might handle drought or windstorms after 100 years.

Old growth city oaks, Dr. Griffin noted, are no bigger than old growth country oaks.

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Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.

Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe's, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.

This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.

Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.

But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.

The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association's effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it's allowed in at all.

Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: "All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn't make it the easiest."

The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field's most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?

Habits of Thought

It wasn't supposed to be this difficult.

Personality problems aren't exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues' gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.

Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.

Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of "confounded identities" that are now considered personality disorders.

Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.

"These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired," said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. "They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether."

Several prototypes soon began to emerge. "A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character," wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, "Character Analysis," a groundbreaking text. "In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern."

Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.

In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association's third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.

These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.

Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.

This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. "Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified," a catchall label meaning little more than "this person has problems" became the most common of the diagnoses.

It's a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn't have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.

Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.

"The diagnoses simply weren't being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible," Dr. Lenzenweger said.

Resisting Simplification 

It was easier said than done.

The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.

A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.

The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to "develop a coherent sense of self or identity." Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.

Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft's top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple's Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications' speech recognition service, and in Google's Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just "neural nets" for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

"There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods," said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. "The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed."

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the "A.I. winter."

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

"This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn't have been expected to win at," said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be "trained" by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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Prototype: Customized Skis, Tailored by Science

CAN a computer algorithm create the perfect pair of skis?

Pete Wagner, a 37-year-old Ohio native, likes to think so. Since 2006, he has been applying his background in mechanical engineering and computer coding to make skis — and a few snowboards, too — that are individually designed to fit each owner.

How does he do it?

"Our computers crunch the numbers," said Mr. Wagner, a self-professed "nerdy engineer" whose shop-factory, Wagner Custom Skis, is in Placerville, Colo., not far from the alpine paradise of Telluride. "We've created a scientific method of fitting people," based on collecting data about other skis they have used, as well as personal information like height and weight, he said.

Mr. Wagner's goal goes beyond creating an innovative product. He wants to retool the way people think about ski shopping. Rather than choosing a pair in a store or online, only to find that after a couple of runs down a mountain that they feel leaden, or don't perform well in powder, he says, people can save time and money by having their skis designed much as they would a custom-made suit or a couture gown. And, yes, as with those luxury items, there is a cost: his skis start at $1,750.

Still, the idea seems to be catching on. Last year, Mr. Wagner sold more than 1,000 pairs of his skis, which are available on the Internet and in a dozen boutique ski shops around the country. He also made a few customized snowboards requested by "friends of friends."

"It's a little bit like getting custom clothing," said Larry Houchon, the owner of Larry's Bootfitting, a ski boot shop in Boulder, Colo., that has a kiosk where customers can order Mr. Wagner's skis. "If you're used to going to Nordstrom's and buying clothing off the rack, but then you suddenly become more interested in your appearance, you're going to go talk to a tailor.

"It's the same with skiing. If you're more committed to skiing better, and with less effort, the skis just make sense."

Not everyone can justify the cost, however. Glenn Muxworthy, a ski buyer for the Ski Company in Rochester, said that there wasn't "a big calling" for custom-made skis because "in this day and age, price is a determining factor." He said that for less than half the price of a pair of Wagner Custom skis, a shopper could buy a pair of Blizzard Cochise skis, a much-buzzed-about product this season.

In Mr. Wagner's system, the process begins by filling out a "Skier DNA" questionnaire. Among other things, the form asks customers to list their sex and weight, the types of terrain where they like to ski — groomed runs, tree runs, backcountry powder, etc. — and the model of skis they've used in the past.

"Skiers can tell us, 'You know, I've got a pair of skis that are five years old,' so they might be a Völkl Mantra from 2007," Mr. Wagner said. "Our design software will understand, O.K., that person's ski has these certain stiffness characteristics, this certain geometry, and is made from these types of materials. Based on that information, and their physical information, where they're skiing, our algorithms will figure out what kind of design is going to be great for them."

After a follow-up consultation with Mr. Wagner — by phone, e-mail, Skype or in person — the design recipe goes to the factory, where computer numerical code machines mill the components of the skis, which are then assembled by hand.

"It's a combination of 21st-century, computer-controlled milling and manufacturing equipment and old-world craftsmanship and attention to detail," he said of the process.

Unlike other boutique ski makers, he added, he does not rely on precast molds. "We always go through the same steps when we create a ski, but every ski is different."

Mr. Wagner's eureka moment came not long after he moved to Telluride in 1998 and bought a new pair of skis that had received high marks in ski magazines.

"I bought them and I started using them and I didn't really question them," he said. "And I skied on them for about 80 days and just adapted to them. But after 80 days of skiing, I tried another set of skis, and that's when I realized I had been crippling myself with the equipment I was on."

When Mr. Wagner wasn't skiing, he was writing software for Penley Research and Development, a company that makes custom-designed golf shafts based on a person's golf swing and size. His experience with his bum skis led him to wonder: what if he adapted the software to create personalized skis?

In 2003, when he enrolled in business school at the University of Colorado, the idea for a customized ski company was still knocking around his head. For his final project, he put together a business plan for his prospective business — but received little encouragement from professors and ski experts.

"There were definitely a lot of industry veterans who were telling me that doing manufacturing in the United States wouldn't work, and that starting a manufacturing business in a remote ski town made no sense," Mr. Wagner said.

Mr. Houchon, who saw Mr. Wagner's business plan, was one of the initial skeptics.

"I was unsure as to whether it would work," he said. "I didn't realize the extent to which Pete could streamline the manufacturing process and how good he was working with computers.

"I thought it would be a lot more tedious and difficult."

In Mr. Wagner's first year in business, he sold 200 pairs of skis. But through word of mouth, and because he could reach so many people through the Internet — which accounts for 90 percent of his sales — his business began to take off.

Even with his bigger workload, can he still find time to ski?

"Oh, absolutely," he said. "We have a powder-day clause at our shop. If the Telluride Ski Resort reports five inches or more, then we come in to work at 1 o'clock."

E-mail: proto@nytimes.com.

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That's not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. "The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money," says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

"It's inconvenient to have to send things to a lab," so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. "Bob is not consumed with any one company," says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. "His mission is to create the idea."

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab's combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer "walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries."

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is "notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it's a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States," says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students "as an extended family," adding that "I really want them to do well."

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta's chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people's health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer's lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer's is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has "come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering," he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

"Very often when you are going for real innovation," he says, "you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it's hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, 'No, that doesn't make sense.' "

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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Prototype: Customized Skis, Tailored by Science

CAN a computer algorithm create the perfect pair of skis?

Pete Wagner, a 37-year-old Ohio native, likes to think so. Since 2006, he has been applying his background in mechanical engineering and computer coding to make skis — and a few snowboards, too — that are individually designed to fit each owner.

How does he do it?

"Our computers crunch the numbers," said Mr. Wagner, a self-professed "nerdy engineer" whose shop-factory, Wagner Custom Skis, is in Placerville, Colo., not far from the alpine paradise of Telluride. "We've created a scientific method of fitting people," based on collecting data about other skis they have used, as well as personal information like height and weight, he said.

Mr. Wagner's goal goes beyond creating an innovative product. He wants to retool the way people think about ski shopping. Rather than choosing a pair in a store or online, only to find that after a couple of runs down a mountain that they feel leaden, or don't perform well in powder, he says, people can save time and money by having their skis designed much as they would a custom-made suit or a couture gown. And, yes, as with those luxury items, there is a cost: his skis start at $1,750.

Still, the idea seems to be catching on. Last year, Mr. Wagner sold more than 1,000 pairs of his skis, which are available on the Internet and in a dozen boutique ski shops around the country. He also made a few customized snowboards requested by "friends of friends."

"It's a little bit like getting custom clothing," said Larry Houchon, the owner of Larry's Bootfitting, a ski boot shop in Boulder, Colo., that has a kiosk where customers can order Mr. Wagner's skis. "If you're used to going to Nordstrom's and buying clothing off the rack, but then you suddenly become more interested in your appearance, you're going to go talk to a tailor.

"It's the same with skiing. If you're more committed to skiing better, and with less effort, the skis just make sense."

Not everyone can justify the cost, however. Glenn Muxworthy, a ski buyer for the Ski Company in Rochester, said that there wasn't "a big calling" for custom-made skis because "in this day and age, price is a determining factor." He said that for less than half the price of a pair of Wagner Custom skis, a shopper could buy a pair of Blizzard Cochise skis, a much-buzzed-about product this season.

In Mr. Wagner's system, the process begins by filling out a "Skier DNA" questionnaire. Among other things, the form asks customers to list their sex and weight, the types of terrain where they like to ski — groomed runs, tree runs, backcountry powder, etc. — and the model of skis they've used in the past.

"Skiers can tell us, 'You know, I've got a pair of skis that are five years old,' so they might be a Völkl Mantra from 2007," Mr. Wagner said. "Our design software will understand, O.K., that person's ski has these certain stiffness characteristics, this certain geometry, and is made from these types of materials. Based on that information, and their physical information, where they're skiing, our algorithms will figure out what kind of design is going to be great for them."

After a follow-up consultation with Mr. Wagner — by phone, e-mail, Skype or in person — the design recipe goes to the factory, where computer numerical code machines mill the components of the skis, which are then assembled by hand.

"It's a combination of 21st-century, computer-controlled milling and manufacturing equipment and old-world craftsmanship and attention to detail," he said of the process.

Unlike other boutique ski makers, he added, he does not rely on precast molds. "We always go through the same steps when we create a ski, but every ski is different."

Mr. Wagner's eureka moment came not long after he moved to Telluride in 1998 and bought a new pair of skis that had received high marks in ski magazines.

"I bought them and I started using them and I didn't really question them," he said. "And I skied on them for about 80 days and just adapted to them. But after 80 days of skiing, I tried another set of skis, and that's when I realized I had been crippling myself with the equipment I was on."

When Mr. Wagner wasn't skiing, he was writing software for Penley Research and Development, a company that makes custom-designed golf shafts based on a person's golf swing and size. His experience with his bum skis led him to wonder: what if he adapted the software to create personalized skis?

In 2003, when he enrolled in business school at the University of Colorado, the idea for a customized ski company was still knocking around his head. For his final project, he put together a business plan for his prospective business — but received little encouragement from professors and ski experts.

"There were definitely a lot of industry veterans who were telling me that doing manufacturing in the United States wouldn't work, and that starting a manufacturing business in a remote ski town made no sense," Mr. Wagner said.

Mr. Houchon, who saw Mr. Wagner's business plan, was one of the initial skeptics.

"I was unsure as to whether it would work," he said. "I didn't realize the extent to which Pete could streamline the manufacturing process and how good he was working with computers.

"I thought it would be a lot more tedious and difficult."

In Mr. Wagner's first year in business, he sold 200 pairs of skis. But through word of mouth, and because he could reach so many people through the Internet — which accounts for 90 percent of his sales — his business began to take off.

Even with his bigger workload, can he still find time to ski?

"Oh, absolutely," he said. "We have a powder-day clause at our shop. If the Telluride Ski Resort reports five inches or more, then we come in to work at 1 o'clock."

E-mail: proto@nytimes.com.

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